2011/08/09

One of the core features of Spotify is searching. You just type the name of an artist or a song into the search bar and off you go. Normally that’s all you need to get the Spotify experience: you know, when you think of some music and literally seconds later you’re listening to it.

There are cases, though, when you need to refine your queries. Perhaps you don’t want to search for “madonna”, because you’re not looking for the artist Madonna, but rather songs whose titles include the word “madonna”. Then you can search for “title:madonna”.

Similarly, you can search for “album:madonna” and “artist:madonna” to find only matching albums and artists, respectively.

Refining your Searches

To further refine your searches (or to indulge in some nostalgia or browse through a new musical genre), you can search for a year, a range of years, or a genre – ie: “year:1969″, “year:1994-1996″ or “genre:soul”.

Logically, you can use combinations to search for techno from the early ’90s or Grateful Dead songs from the late ’60s. Simply type in “genre:techno year:1990-1995″ or “artist:”grateful dead” year:1965-1970″. In the latter example, you see how you can use quotes to control to what parts of the search string a keyword applies.

Searching by Genre

Searching by genre, such as “genre:jazz”, is very popular but a lot of people are unaware of what genres they can search for. To help you get more out of your searches we’ve put together a list of all the genres in Spotify. Some of the genres contain two words in which case you need to add quotation marks to the search for it to work properly. For example to find Appalachian Folk music you need to search for “genre:”Appalachian Folk””.

Have a look at this Google Doc to see all 944 genres listed. Not all of them may be available since we may not have all genres of music yet but you should be able to find the majority of them.

Searching by Record Label

Searching for a label is just as easy; just type “label:” before the label name in the search box. An example would be label:warp. If the label you’re searching for contains a space, you must enclose it in quotation marks, like in label:”rough trade”.